Antelope resurgence this week, as well as a host of other animals:
    Nyala: an antelope
    Oribi: an African antelope
    Oryx: an African antelope (extinct, but if you've read Oryx and Crake you would know that)
    I'd post pictures, but there are other, far more interesting mammals today.

This book is intense, particularly if you have connections to Mormonism. Makes you look at the Mountain Meadows Massacre from a different angle—three different angles, in fact, from the perspective of three different wives of John D. Lee (three of the nineteen wives, although eleven of them left him before he was shot by a firing squad as the scapegoat of the massacre).

I grew up in Utah as a Mormon and heard about the Mountain Meadows Massacre (even visited the monument there once, when I was younger!), but I dismissed the whole affair as evil folks perverting the Gospel. Turns out that it wasn't quite like that. Freeman's book gives a possible fictional example of the complexities and genuine atrocities involved. Brigham Young's Blood Atonement doctrine was frightening.

This week: all sorts of fools, raging elephants, violent ways to lynch people (hint: involves burning tires), words not to use, and turnips.

Enjoyable and time-consuming, as usual. There are so many different kinds of everything.

I've now passed page 337 of the OSPD Fourth Edition, which marks the halfway point of the Super Ultra Mega Scrabble Dictionary Read-a-Thon 2014.

It's been hard to keep up at times, between family, editing work, and grad school, but every time I stop to read I become re-interested. We live far beneath our powers of communication, in my opinion. There are words for things I never knew existed. There are words for verbs I never thought could be verbs. And just contemplating the definition of a word I thought I knew can spark a new understanding or nuance of that concept.

In a word, it's been enlightening (which, by the way, is not in the Scrabble Dictionary, and makes me want to read the full OED).

My coding methods in the dictionary margins have solidified:

    U = Units of things. Why units? I am amazed that humans can settle on what can often be an arbitrary amount of something, and as that something becomes a standard, it becomes the point of departure from which meaning is made.
    ♡ = Words I particularly love for whatever reason. They usually tend to be words for different kinds of winds or words I find amusing or ridiculous (e.g., bovinity: the state of being a cow).
    ? = Words I'd like to see a picture of or investigate further (which I admittedly don't often have time to do). I sometimes post the best ones in a slideshow in the posts.
     ! = Surprising or unexpected words or definitions
    V = Vivid words I might like to use in my writing sometime (I don't blog about these)
    M = Metaphysical words I read that take me into thought tangents. I'll probably write about these at some point (e.g., fact: something known with certainty . . . can one really know something with certainty? Or do we just like being certain about things because it makes us feel more in control of life, which is ultimately uncontrollable? I've found that knowledge I previously thought was fact has often been replaced by a greater knowledge, or perhaps wisdom, which is often unaccompanied not by a feeling of certainty but of humility at my continued ignorance of life, the universe, and everything in it.)
    [ = connections between similar words, whether real or imagined. I'll probably write more about this later as well.
    :( = words where the male is neutral and the female is marked. If you haven't read "Wears Jump Suit. Sensible Shoes. Uses Husband's Last Name." by Deborah Tannen, I highly recommend it (it's online and free). It has changed the way I look at people.
    D = Direction words. To help me be more descriptive in my writing.

Here's to the rest of a great year! Thanks for reading.

Straddling the world of science and literary fiction—without falling into the abyss that is science fiction, which seems at times so noxious to the literary elite (I like science fiction)—is no easy feat. Andrea Barrett has been my foundational bridge in combining the two worlds. In Ship Fever (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1996), which won the National Book Award, Barrett dips into the lives of scientists and their families and friends, and with the solid historical facts about famous, infamous, and obscure scientists and the metaphysical world of the imagination and fictional narrative, Barrett becomes an alchemist and transforms the two disparate fields of science and literary fiction into an informative, enjoyable experience.